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According to Forrester, North American and European countries have migrated and are already running approximately 18 percent of their custom-built application software on public cloud platforms, and businesses are increasingly inclined to rent processing and storage from vendors rather than stand up infrastructure themselves.

Forrester also reports many companies are “challenging the notion that public clouds are not suited for core business applications,” opting to move mission-critical workloads to the public cloud for increased agility and efficiency despite perceived myths that public cloud platforms aren’t as secure as internal data centers might be.

Forrester compares the public cloud of today to adolescent children on the fast track to adulthood, suggesting it will be “the dominant technology model in a little over three years.”

“Today’s public cloud services are like teenagers—exuberant, sometimes awkward, and growing rapidly,” the report states. “By 2020, public cloud services will be like adults, with serious [enterprise] responsibilities and slower growth.”

Federal agencies have inched forward in cloud, first with email-as-a-service offerings and later with a growing number of infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service offerings, but they’ve been slowed in part by lagging legacy technologies that tend to make up their enterprise.

If either piece of legislation is enacted—or some combination of both—the government’s spend on cloud computing is likely to increase and fall more in line with what industry is doing, using cloud computing as the base for IT enterprises.